


Glass and Shadows

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Mercverse stories [2]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory, Character Study, Family, Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Torture, Memories, Memory Loss, Mercverse, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-02
Updated: 2006-12-02
Packaged: 2017-12-26 04:55:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/961799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes he thinks his soul is torn, and every time he dies another piece of his past bleeds away. Cloud, on memory and penance; a companion piece to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/961796">Yesterday and Tomorrow</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glass and Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in the [Mercverse AU](http://mercverse.livejournal.com/) ([which has since moved to Insane Journal](http://asylums.insanejournal.com/mercverse/)), created by [Katrina](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Katrina/profile), aka [icedark_elf](http://icedark-elf.insanejournal.com/). Here is her summary of the AU:
> 
> _The Mercverse is a FF7 AU world spawned by various pics people sent me or I found roaming the mass of sites I can't understand. They were full of shinies. Some of the pics are[here](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v308/sinfulgreed/Mercs/). If you know of others, send them my way and I'll be more than willing to go "ooh, shiny" and probably write more fic._
> 
> _The universe is completely open. The only canon is the following: Cloud is immortal, Sephiroth is a mage adept, Zack is more than human, and Vincent and Chaos are half-demon twin brothers. Other than that...have at thee. Want to bring in other fandoms, ignore everything else besides what I just said was canon, or anything else? Feel free to do so._
> 
> The participating authors later agreed on some other bits of canon -- Cloud is obsessed with tea; Zack was a street rat in Midgar before Cloud adopted him; Cloud is related to the Shinra royal family; Aeris and Tifa work in a nightclub; the world is an uneasy balance of fantasy and high-tech; neither demons nor Cetra are native to this world, and a couple thousand years ago they fought a massive war; Cloud is probably Jenova's grandson -- but those are less 'fixed,' so to speak. (Also, a lot of the backstory was my own invention, so I'm never sure how firmly it was adopted by other participants.)

His life is a series of flashes, seen through wavering glass. Most days -- most years -- are dim and lost forever. Some events, and more people, stand out like colored etchings against the foggy, greenish blur. Now and then he tries keeping journals, or collecting photographs and paintings, but paper crumbles, electronic media degrade, chemicals decompose, paint cracks and fades. Nothing stays with him forever.

The worst thing his uncle did to him wasn't physical torture. It wasn't even the less tangible pain of betrayal. It was theft. Five years of death after death after death wore away pieces of his mind, memories leached out one by one by one, lost into the lifestream and its chorus of souls.

Sometimes he thinks his soul is torn, and every time he dies another piece of his past bleeds away.

\---------------

His mother drank tea every morning. She liked to brush his hair and tell him nonsense stories. She fed songbirds by hand on her bedroom balcony. One day, she took him outside in midwinter and they went sledding down the mountain, so far it took them three hours to walk home after they tumbled sideways into the snow to avoid crashing into a tree.

He doesn't know the words to her stories. He doesn't remember why she liked birds. He doesn't know if she played with him any other times. He doesn't remember her face, or the color of her hair.

He doesn't know her name.

He could find out -- Shinra family records are obsessively accurate back nearly three hundred years before the great war, stopping just short of the family's origin, which he suspects was a bit too humble for new royalty to want remembered. But he never looks. A name without a face would somehow be worse than nothing.

Some nights he dreams he is a child again, standing outside the house and looking up to see his mother surrounded by songbirds, their tiny wings beating as they rise from her hands. He is quiet, but she notices him and moves toward the balcony rail, calling his name. Just as the birds are about to part, to let him see her face, he wakes.

All his friends and partners and adopted children, over the centuries, have learned to avoid him the days after those dreams.

\---------------

He doesn't remember exactly how he escaped from his uncle. Now and again he has vague, formless nightmares of glass and green and blood, but beyond the vivid, single image of his first sword jammed through his uncle's ribs, the man's blue-gray eyes wide and staring, his mouth gaping in shock and, strangely, betrayal, he can't recall how he got loose.

He remembers running quite clearly.

He had a sister -- the product of his mother's remarriage at his uncle's orders -- who was raised in Midgar after her father sent his mother back to the mountains. He had a stepbrother from that same loveless political alliance. He knew his mother was dead. He knew his cousins would most likely kill him in revenge. All he had left was hope.

When he collapsed outside his stepbrother's castle, shaking with fever and limping on blistered, oozing feet in the chill of spring thaw, his sister took him in. She bathed and bandaged him, nursed him through his fever, and wept when she told him his feet would be crippled for life. Impatient, he slit his wrists, letting death wash away his wounds. She cursed him for hours when he revived, and cursed their uncle more when he told her his disjointed memories of the past five years.

Then she sold herself back to his family, in return for his safety.

Sometimes he sees her face in her descendents, and sometimes fragments of her sweetness. He nearly always sees her iron determination -- that trait seems to pass unbroken down the generations. The kings and queens he considers his nieces and nephews honor her memory. The ones he only calls cousins recall the other side of his family.

He knows his sister's face, but somewhere in the long centuries since her death, he lost her name. He thinks it was something like his, a word, something from nature. Maybe Wind or Rain. Maybe Dawn or Star. Maybe a bird. He thinks it was something about the sky. He thinks their mother dreamed of flying.

He doesn't look for his sister's name, either. He doesn't have any excuse for losing that memory, not like he has an excuse for letting go of his mother. The tiny emptiness in his heart, where a name should go with a face, is his penance.

If he dreams of her, he never remembers upon waking.

\---------------

He lived with his stepbrother for nearly fifty years, until his brother's sharp-angled face had gone slack with age, and his blond hair thinned and turned bone white. He remembers the child and the dying man, but the years between are gone. Now and again he tries to project the child's face forward or the old man's face back, and picture his brother as the young man who gave him sanctuary, but it's a pointless exercise and he's never been all that imaginative anyway.

It was his brother who suggested he try mercenary work, who refused to let him fade into a mindless husk or wear himself hollow with guilt. It was his brother who taught him to find the humor in the horrors of life, and to maneuver around a court and a battlefield. It was his brother who glued together the pieces his sister had saved, and made sure her sacrifice had meaning.

He spent the next two centuries watching his brother's descendents as well as his blood family, trying to guide them through the chaos as the nobility fought to fill the vacant throne, to replace the old royal family Jenova had slaughtered. Often the Shinra and Malfoy families were at odds, in which case he simply tried to keep them all alive.

Life, as his brother taught him, is full of ironies: when the Shinra finally seized the throne, the new king married his son to the Malfoy heiress.

Life is also cruel: the entire Malfoy family died, killed at the royal wedding in an attack by various disaffected nobles.

He suspected the king had arranged the deaths, but he had no proof. He suspected it might have been his own fault, for favoring his brother's family as much as his own. But all he could do was pay his cousin a midnight visit with a sword, to deliver a warning, and then comfort his adoptive niece in her grief. The best revenge, he told her, was to outlive the king, and to make sure her children would never follow his example.

The first king's reign was bloody and brief. His son's reign was similar. His grandson, often called the Great, unified the empire through diplomacy as well as war, stabilized the economy, and created a legal code that was followed for nearly five centuries. Every law skewed in favor of the nobility... and the ennoblement of commoners was restricted to the point where it became nearly impossible. 

He wonders if that king was his brother reborn. He thinks his brother would have appreciated the irony. He also thinks it would have served him right, especially since the king eventually fell in love with a commoner and was forced to break his own laws to marry her.

Sometimes he dreams about his brother, dreams that they sit in a room, or a tent, or outside -- wherever he happens to be at the time -- and talk about the state of the world, about politics and trade and weapons and magic and the way nobody ever seems to learn anything from the past, no matter how clear and applicable the examples are. His brother sneers at anyone and everyone, mocking them from the exalted height of his noble heritage, only to undercut the arrogance with a flight of whimsy.

The evenings after those dreams, he drinks a glass of wine to his brother's memory, and then shatters the glass in pointless waste. Who, after all, has the authority to tell him no?

\---------------

Sometimes he looks back at the endless murk of his past and wonders if he's forgotten anything unforgivable, and then forgotten that he should have remembered. He wonders how much the lifestream has stolen from him. He wonders if all the memories still exist, like self-perpetuating waves or a labyrinth of mirrors, somehow independent of his own fallible mind. He wonders if someday, when he can finally rest, he'll be able to remember.

He wants to believe that souls can touch and speak to each other in the lifestream, that he might meet his mother and his sister and his brother again one day.

When he sees his mother, he wants to recognize her face.

**Author's Note:**

> "Glass and Shadows" is, among other things, an attempt to handwave Cloud's actual relationship to the Shinra royal family. I said they were his cousins, the descendants of his uncle. Then [icedark_elf](http://icedark-elf.insanejournal.com/) referred to one queen as Cloud's _niece_. In other words, at some point Cloud had at least one sibling.
> 
> This bollixed my personal timeline, in which Cloud and his mother lived in moderate isolation in Nibelheim until his first death, around his twentieth birthday. I worried at the problem for a while, and eventually concluded that Cloud's uncle must have married his sister off in a political alliance of some sort, which produced a child; then his mother either divorced her second husband or separated from him, possibly at his whim instead of hers. The child was raised by the father, leaving Cloud's mother doubly alone when her son died.
> 
> And at some point, this half-sibling, or his/her descendants, married back into the Shinra line. I decided a half-sister worked better than a half-brother -- it saved me the bother of two marriages (to straighten out the family names, assuming patrilineality) -- and then couldn't think of a name. At some point, I'd also decided that the other noble families could be filled in by stealing crossover characters from various other series, and that Cloud's mother married a Malfoy. It amused me to make her marry Lucius and thereby make Draco and Cloud stepbrothers.
> 
> The idea kicked around in my head for a while, but refused to coalesce into a workable story form. Then, on the evening of 12/1/06, I was thinking about Cloud's inability to remember his mother (as per yuenoclow's tea ficlet, **[Faded Memories](http://mercverse.livejournal.com/18163.html)** ), and something clicked my brain into First Corinthians ch. 13 -- the lines about seeing through a glass, darkly, and childish things being put away.
> 
> The _lack_ of memory became the focus of the story.
> 
> This is why I never use personal names, not even the ones Cloud remembers, and especially not his own name.


End file.
